ation stood is vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas
has departed. But the torch she held still burns. From the emptiness
of her virginal arms, that never were filled, proceeds all
civilization.

Adjacently at Eleusis was Demeter. Pallas was the soul of Greece.
Eleusis was the Jerusalem, Demeter the Madonna.

Demeter--the earth, the universal mother--had, in a mystic hymen with
her brother Zeus, conceived Persephone. The latter, when young and a
maiden, beckoned perhaps by Eros, wandered from Olympos and was
gathering flowers when Pluto, borne by black horses, erupted, raped
her, and tore her away. The cries of the indignant Demeter sterilized
the earth. To assuage her, Zeus undertook to have Persephone
recovered, provided that in Hades, of which Pluto was lord, she had
eaten nothing. But the girl had--a pomegranate grain. It was the
irrevocable. Demeter yielded, as the high gods had to yield, to what
was higher than they, to Destiny. Meanwhile, in the shadows below,
Persephone was transfigured.

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh and
that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow: but thou, Proserpina, sleep....
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night
where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from
the heart, ...
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star.
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place and forget what was done or
undone.
Thou art more than the gods that number the days of our temporal breath
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.

Like Hesiod, Swinburne erred, though perhaps intentionally, as poets
should, for the greater glory of the Muses. Persephone brought not
death but life. The aisles of despair she filled with hope.
Transfigured herself, Pluto she transformed. She changed what had been
hell into what was to be purgatory. It was not yet Elysium, but it was
no longer Hades. Plato said that those who were in her world had no
wish at all for this.

It is for that reason that Demeter is the Madonna of Greece, as her
ethereal daughter was the saviour. The myth